ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms.

This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it.

So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.

Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it.

It has happened before and it will happen again.

Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.

Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe...

I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.

What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?

Does this imply that undocumented aliens subject to deportation have been making claims on Medicare/Medicaid monies?

Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.

If you worry about paying rent or buying food you likely don't care if some abstract entity knows to what kind of videos you jerk off.

You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address.

> This is a devil's bargain

Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?

It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.

The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.

Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.

If you take your hands off the wheel you can go a surprisingly long time before you crash. This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point.

Once the Baltic nations gained independence they tried everyone involved in the administration of those orders, which took place without trial or oversight and often resulted in the replacement families being deported if the actual tagets could not be found.

Ofc Stalin or any of the power brokers at the time were long dead, so instead it was a parade of lower level admin workers, all who were elderly in their 80s or 90s and who at that time were young, simply doing the bidding of their employers.

The lesson: don't be a bag holder for people who will die before you leaving you to hold the responsibility for their crimes.

US will not lock up a single asshole who helps kill thousands of people abroad (not even inconvenience them with a simple court appearance to have to justify themselves), but it sure can lock up thousands on flimsiest justifications like FTA in court because of whatever, or technical parole violations, or driving on suspended license, basically for failures to navigate bureaucracy while poor.

I'll believe in rule of law when at least shits who materially support mass killings of children will start getting locked up. But alas, no. No such thing.

Until then it's all just bullshit that normal people have to submit to, and ruling class gets to excuse itself from with endless lawyering, exceptions, and nonsense, while it's clear they're still just scum psychos doing scum psycho things.

This is the unitary executive theory. It’s a novel Constitutional theory that even this SCOTUS seems reluctant to honestly embrace.

I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.

If the law says you can share aliens information, but not Americans information, and then you do share Americans information I think you're probably breaking the law, and at the very least there should be a process to find out what the basis is for you doing it. Normally these things would be decided by a court.

It’s the legally-correct term.

For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.

The article is about feeding a giant pile of metadata to a service and getting results. That pile was collected in a mundane manner as a part of everyday actions. People probably didn't think much of it at the time. Even if the potential for abuse occurred to them, clearly the vast majority swept the concern aside and went on about their day.

That's exactly what's happening with the internet giants as well. People embed analytics and bot detectors and fonts and who knows what else from major third party providers with hardly a second thought. Other people then navigate to those websites with little to no awareness of the potential for abuse.

This article is about a concrete example of such potential abuse that went on for many years before blindsiding a great many people when it was abruptly weaponized overnight.

So, before it's too late, we, the people potentially enabling this data abuse, must think about consequences and morals.

Also: today they come for Latinos, tomorrow can be your turn.

I would be curious to have data / information showing that.

This is the pitch of every consulting company ever.

In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.

For example I see zero freedom difference between my ath10k with its firmware loaded from disk by libre software, and my x520 with firmware stored in onboard flash. Neither undermines the freedom or security of my workstation user domain, and both are unfree if I get the itch to dig into modifying my network cards.

Yes. That’s how we lawfully deport them. You can’t run out and start serial killing illegal immigrants and then claim you aren’t a murderer.

Maybe because under Obama agents didn't go around smashing windows:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/ice-detentio...

Note: the above person was an asylum seeker, so following the official process (AFAICT).

Or under Obama they didn't pull away people who were in line to take the Oath of Allegiance:

* https://people.com/immigrants-approved-for-citizenship-pulle...

Or take US citizens out of their homes, in their underwear, in the middle of winter:

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...

Perhaps under Obama due process was followed, or not going after / grabbing people randomly based on the color of their skin:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop

He got tons of pushback from the left. He was just able to weather his party’s fringe in ways Republicans have not.

> Do you purchase unilever products? Nike shoes? Etc, etc, etc.

So you actually support that idea.

It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).

Sounds like Americans are in general fine with all of it. Voting patterns hold. General sentiment still remains aligned with the status quo. There does not seem like there are any consequences for the representatives to not represent the people.

I haven't lost any of my rights yet. Certainly not in the past month. All the mechanisms to deport people were already there.